noteworthy wrote:
Bob McDonnell:

Americans were shocked on Christmas Day to learn of the attempted bombing of a flight to Detroit. This foreign terror suspect was given the same legal rights as a U.S. citizen, and immediately stopped providing critical intelligence.

As Senator-elect Scott Brown says, we should be spending taxpayer dollars to defeat terrorists, not to protect them.

I am frankly appalled that candidates and officials continue to score points with this rhetoric. Back in the heat of the 2008 campaign, Palin got cheers for making a quip of it, and Obama responded:

"The reason that you have this principle is not to be soft on terrorism. It's because that's who we are. That's what we're protecting."

I was bothered by this too - Palindrome and I discussed it last night, it bothered her even more.

Whats odd is that as far I know there has been relatively little political hay made of the recent criminal conviction of a Georgia Tech student for providing material support for foreign terrorism. If the Republicans truly believe that all terrorism suspects should be denied trials, why aren't they speaking out about that conviction. I see two possibilities:

1. Its not politically expedient because the prosecutions where started by the Bush administration and their goal is more about scoring political points against the other party than actually articulating a substantive policy position.

2. They are drawing some kind of line. They see the two situations as being different, possibly because the Tech student was a "U.S. Person" and not a foreign national or because the nature of the offenses is different? (While people are often stalwart in the defense of their own civil liberties, the civil liberties of others are more rarely defended.)

Last night I was leaning toward 2 but now I'm leaning toward 1.

Its also worth pointing out that while the Obama administration might have better sounding political rhetoric, its not clear what their actual position is. They have decided to hold 50 detainees forever because any potential trial has been tainted by the use of torture, they've engaged in an effort to shut down Gitmo, which is both ill considered and phony, and they seem to have picked up the Bush Administration's line everywhere regarding the use of state secrets to absolve themselves of responsibility for illegal acts.

If there is some sort of substantive difference between Obama and Bush on civil liberties and the treatment of detainees its not clear to me what it is. It seems to me that both parties are offering us the exact same operational policies and the real difference is just the spin they put on what they are doing - what color bottle the sugar water comes in.

RE: Bob McDonnell's Appalling GOP Response

Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now , a radio and television show aired by public and college broadcasters across North America, was entering Canada around 6 p.m. Pacific time Wednesday evening, set to speak at the Vancouver Public Library in an event co-ordinated by a campus radio station at Simon Fraser University.

“When I handed our passports over the border guard, they told us to pull over. We had to go over to the border facility. And they started asking me questions about what I was going to be speaking about. I was totally taken aback. They wanted to see my notes,” Ms. Goodman told the Globe Thursday, recalling the encounter...

She claimed the officer persisted in questioning her about Vancouver's upcoming Games...

They began to search her notes and computers and those of her two colleagues, Ms. Goodman alleged. They then photographed the journalist and gave her a stipulation to leave the country by Friday night. They were delayed over an hour...

“There's supposed to be a separation between the state and the press. The fact that the state was going through my documents, that they were rifling through notes, that they were asking me what I was planning to speak about, is a very serious issue,” she said.

“If journalists fear they will be…monitored, it's more difficult for the public to get information. And information is the currency of a democracy.”

For several years the ACLU has been fighting a U.S. policy that empowers CBP to exclude foreign nationals for ideological reasons. As the US has failed to take the right position on this issue, we cannot be terribly offended when our allies take a similar position to our own. Even when it includes potentially excluding our journalists from their countries...

This case also highlights the risk of allowing suspicionless border searches of laptops. These laptops were not searched for child pornography. They were searched in order to determine what the journalists planned to speak about. As U.S. policy provides for ideological exclusion of foreign nationals, it is reasonable to expect that laptops of foreign nationals might be inspected to determine their thoughts and views. This puts the term "politically correct" in a whole new light.

U.S. journalist says she was delayed at Canadian border, questioned about speech - The Globe and Mail

Matthew Hoh, in September:

It is with great regret and disappointment I submit my resignation from my appointment as a Political Officer in the Foreign Service and my post as the Senior Civilian Representative for the US Government in Zabul Province.

Success and victory, whatever they may be, will not be realized in years, after billions more spent, but in decades and generations.

Karen DeYoung, yesterday:

While he did not share Hoh's view that the war "wasn't worth the fight," Holbrooke said, "I agreed with much of his analysis."

George Packer:

Richard Holbrooke must know that there will be no American victory in this war; he can only try to forestall potential disaster. But if he considers success unlikely, or even questions the premise of the war, he has kept it to himself.

DeYoung continues:

Late last year, a friend told Hoh that the State Department was offering year-long renewable hires for Foreign Service officers in Afghanistan. It was a chance, he thought, to use the development skills he had learned in Tikrit under a fresh administration that promised a new strategy.

The Economist on Obama, from last November:

He has to start deciding whom to disappoint.

Ahmed Rashid, last month:

For the first time, polling shows that a majority of Americans do not approve of Obama's handling of Afghanistan. Yet if it is to have any chance of success, the Obama plan for Afghanistan needs a serious long-term commitment -- at least for the next three years. Democratic politicians are demanding results before next year's congressional elections, which is neither realistic nor possible. Moreover, the Taliban are quite aware of the Democrats' timetable. With Obama's plan the US will be taking Afghanistan seriously for the first time since 2001; if it is to be successful it will need not only time but international and US support -- both open to question.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, in 2005:

The Army will need this lieutenant 20 years from now when he could be a colonel, or 30 years from now when he could have four stars on his collar. But I doubt he will be in uniform long enough to make captain.

If you keep faith with soldiers and tell them the truth even when it threatens their beliefs, you run the risk of losing them. But if you peddle cleverly manipulated talking points to people who trust you not to lie, you won't merely lose them, you'll break their hearts.

Andrew Lahde:

Today I write not to gloat. Instead, I am writing to say goodbye.

Frank Sandoval:

My heart swells in my chest and while I laugh,
I feel fear, smell a faint stench of insanity.

A very clear argument against staying in Afghanistan

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, in 2006, voted with a majority to uphold the death penalty in a Kansas case. In his opinion, Scalia declared that, in the modern judicial system, there has not been "a single case--not one--in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit. If such an event had occurred in recent years, we would not have to hunt for it; the innocent's name would be shouted from the rooftops."

Apparently, that innocent person's name is Cameron Todd Willingham.

Texas could become the first state to acknowledge officially that, since the advent of the modern judicial system, it had carried out the “execution of a legally and factually innocent person.”

Justice Scalia in 2009:

"This court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is 'actually' innocent."

I wrote previously that:

I think this is one of those moments when there is a clear division between right and wrong.

In 2003 I recommended an interesting web site:

Here you can see the last statements of people executed in Texas.

Sure enough, this site is still in operation, and today, Cameron Todd Willingham's Information Sheet and Last Statement are there, although the Statement is incomplete because the government omitted part of it "due to profanity."

No shit?

Click through for Noteworthy's post, and then through again for the article.

Executing innocent people

noteworthy wrote:
Henry Blodget:

If the "TARP bonus" bill the House passed today becomes law, any of the hundreds of thousands of people who work for Citigroup, Bank of America, AIG, and nine other major US corporations will have to fork over 90 cents of every bonus dollar that puts their household income over $250,000.

That's household income, not individual income. If you're married and filing singly, you'll have to surrender anything over $125,000. Indefinitely.

What a load of crap. This person barely understands the bill. There are systemic problems with the system of bonus compensation at these banks. I'm sure there are many nice people who are effected who are not personally responsible for the financial meltdown, but the sympathy plea is just so tone deaf!

Take away the bonuses, and the financial class has no safety net.

Cry me a fucking river!

$250,000 is a decent chunk of change (though, trust me, it doesn't buy that great a lifestyle in New York).

Doesn't buy that great a lifestyle in New York? Thats FIVE TIMES the average annual salary in the city.

If they want to endear the American public to an alternate solution than this 90 percent tax they seriously need to cut this "if I'm not a millionaire how will I ever survive" crap. No one buys that.

RE: Now We Really ARE Screwed

There is a thrill in switching off the mobile, taking the bus to somewhere without CCTV and paying cash for your tea. You and your innocence can spend an afternoon alone together, unseen by officialdom.

That used to be the kind of sentiment you'd read in a science fiction novel. This is a newspaper.

E-borders - the new frontier of oppression

Jed Rubenfeld, in the Stanford Law Review:

This Article is about the Fourth Amendment. It is an attempt to recover that amendment’s core meaning and core principles.

By revitalizing the right to be secure, Fourth Amendment law can vindicate its text, recapture its paradigm cases, and find the anchor it requires to stand firm against executive abuse.

Julian Sanchez, on Rubenfeld's essay:

Rubenfeld's essay is not another catalog of privacy threats, but rather a provocative reexamination of the meaning of the Fourth Amendment—one that manages to be simultaneously radical (in the sense of "going to the root"), novel, and plausible in a way I would not have thought possible so late in the game.

Rubenfeld's big apple-to-the-noggin idea is this: mainstream jurisprudence regards the Fourth Amendment as protecting an individual right to "privacy"—which in the late 20th century came to mean the individual's "reasonable expectation of privacy"—with courts tasked with "balancing" this against the competing value of security. This, the good professor argues, is basically backwards: the Fourth Amendment explicitly protects the "security" of our personal lives. Excavating a neglected 17th and 18th century conception of "security" leads to a new reading that both avoids well-known internal problems with the "reasonable expectation" view and helps us grapple with the thorny privacy challenges posed by new technologies.

This new conception of the 4th amendment is potentially very important - In my view the combined effect of the third-party doctrine, which states that what you tell Google you've told the government, and the notion that machines cannot violate your privacy, will enable the rise of a total surveillance society in which everyone is watched by law enforcement all the time. We are very close to the point where the 4th amendment will be an anachronism - a technicality that has very little impact on everyday life - and a radical reconsideration will be necessary in order to re-establish it.

The End of Privacy

Noam Cohen's friend:

Privacy is serious. It is serious the moment the data gets collected, not the moment it is released.

Echoing my thoughts on Arod. Glad it was said.

As Data Collecting Grows, Privacy Erodes

The ultimate recommendation of this article makes no sense:

Polarization along party lines may be uncomfortable, but the parties now actually stand for something, and it makes more sense than ever to stand with one of them.

It does not follow that you ought to stand by a party simply because parties stand for something. In fact, you cannot stand by either of these parties unless you accept, whole cloth, all or nearly all of the positions that party supports. Most partisans will gladly argue any of their party's positions and eagerly insist that anyone who raises but a moments doubt about any of those positions must surely be a hard line partisan of the opposite variety. Such thinking is not the product of objective consideration of facts nor reality but rather it represents deciding what party one belongs to before deciding what one thinks about politics. Anti-partisanship is a natural counter reaction to the idiotic, peer-pressured, identity groupthink that has all but conquered the American scene.

RE: On the Side of the Angels: An Appreciation of Parties & Partisanship

noteworthy wrote:
Characterizing this proposal as "bald faced authoritarianism" is a bit over the top. Certainly one can question the necessity for, and appropriateness of, a federally mandated service-learning graduation requirement, but this idea has a long history, and in some school districts such programs are already in place.

To be absolutely clear, my problem begins and end with the use of the word require and what that word implies. There is a difference between encouraging and requiring and that difference matters when you are talking about the coercive use of government power. Lets change contexts to put this in perspective.

Exercise is good for you, right? Everyone ought to exercise every day. We have federal government programs that attempt to encourage exercise. Most high schools and colleges have some sort of fitness requirement for graduation.

So why not create a federal requirement that all Americans exercise? If its good for most people its good for everybody, right? Lets require 30 minutes of cardiovascular exercise from each citizen once a day. No exceptions will be made. If you do not perform the required exercise you will be imprisoned for not more than two years and fined not less than $100,000.

Is that unreasonable? If you think the President's fitness challenge is OK but the sort of requirement I'm describing is not, there has to be a line that you'd draw where you would oppose these requirements. Why do you draw that line where you draw it?

You seem to want to have pragmatic reasons for drawing the line. I have structural reasons. I don't oppose a daily federal fitness requirement because I don't think it would be effective. In fact, I DO think it would be effective. I would personally be better off if we had it. I oppose it because I think its antithetical to a free society.

When the government taxes your time and your labor, this is something catagorically different from when it taxes your money. Thats where I draw the line. Its possible that an existential threat to the future of your country can put you in a position where you have no choice but to institute a military draft, but unless you have reached that point, the way I see it, you can either choose to be a free society, or you can choose to force innocent people against their will to give up their time to serve the interests of the state.

Generally speaking, I think the people who support these requirements know that they are antithetical to freedom, and that is why they do not and would not impose them on themselves or their peers. These requirements are generally imposed on minors. The adults who write these laws, enforce these laws, and vote for politicians who support these laws are not saying that they, themselves should be subject to a government requirement that they perform 50 or 100 hours of community service a year.... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]

RE: Changes at Change.gov